Abstract
We propose that infants may learn about the relative order of heads
and complements in their language before they know many words, on
the basis of prosodic information (relative prominence within phonological
phrases). We present experimental evidence that 6201312-week-old
infants can discriminate two languages that differ in their head
direction and its prosodic correlate, but have otherwise similar
phonological properties (i.e. French and Turkish). This result supports
the hypothesis that infants may use this kind of prosodic information
to bootstrap their acquisition of word order.
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